Billy Barry Block
https://elijahrah.itch.io/billy-barry-block-a-short-story-collection
He made his name Billy Barry Block as a stage name for his acting career; he thought he should have a name that sounded catchy; what was his old name? Oh, it is not to be mentioned; words bring associations and names burn all the more bright as does the heating metal bar upon which the unconscious hand cannot help but touch; it is to be subsumed into the corners of the unconscious which would be possible if his family and friends could just let his name disappear, if it faded to dust like all things do except for the glorious name of Billy Barry Block, he forgot the name of his grandfather and the possibility of being seen as stupid or calloused like the hands of his grandfather after the trials of hard labor so he would never ask and he thought that if his grandfather had been significant enough such a thing as forgetting would never happen, he remembered the way his grandfather croaked and choked and gagged in unceremonious throes of phlegm and blood and thought that such memory could propel performance, as for his current friends and family perhaps the best thing to do would be to cut them off entirely and never let such gangrenous infections of the mind make scabs upon the meningites; they thought his name was stupid and he took this to mean that they thought he was stupid but he tried to fight off the beast of doubt and tear such ideas asunder so that he may live under the glowing, shifting eye of greatness, perhaps if he searched his memories and studied interactions in the manner of an actor he could kbow for sure if they thought he was stupid but fear loomed in the dried, dying grasses of his mind, truth was the food upon which doubt preyed, they said that it sounded stolen from a show, that he couldn’t get far or at least wouldn’t be taken seriously; he needed to signify who he was differently; he was now Billy Barry Block and he would be a big star and make millions and merchandise from his movies would be signed and sold for exorbitant prices; his signature would become its own form of language, its own alphabet; one could tell him that is not how language or the alphabet works and that the proper term would be font but a font wasn’t that interesting; the world wasn’t ruled by Times New Roman; Mr Billy Barry Block would say the world was ruled by English without caring for any of the implications of a language dominating modes of expression; he thought nothing of linguistics, he just knew the kids and even the adults would go to the theater to watch big budget movies made in English and he wrote in the what he would call the English alphabet (although calling it the Latin alphabet would be more accurate) and his signature would be its own subset of the English alphabet (impossible because his signature does not cover all 26 letters of the alphabet and furthermore uses the exact same alphabet as the English language, again making it at best a font, an incomplete font without all 26 letters); his whole, his soul, his identity would marked in press coverage but he wanted his signature to stand as its own language and his brain could not comprehend a world where it was not his own language and alphabet, but still a version of English, thus making it more a dialect if anything, but dialects were never really a thing he caught on to as he wasn’t good with accents but the big movie stars don’t need to do accents he thought, that’s for those pretentious artsy types that think they know better than the masses hurling shit from a high tower and expecting the masses to eat because the people who shit it out ate good food and think they have cleaner byproducts than everyone else; surely they aren’t any better for you or otherwise the future movie star Billy Barry Block would be great at accents (he seemingly ignored the fact that accents can be done for a multitude of reasons and have been done in completely low brow movies but Billy Barry Block thought himself the king of entertainment, the king of lowbrow even if he would never call it lowbrow not out of rejection of the high/lowbrow distinction as an intelligent director or actor going against the grain of academic or artistic views of mass entertainment and more out of not knowing what either high or lowbrow meant and how to distinguish such things even as distinguishing such things should be easy having exposure to art and having heard the definition, the dots should connect easily but it wouldn’t for him had he been introduced to such concepts properly; he simply divided between that which he could understand and that which he couldn’t understand). He watched the big budget stars and understood the messages of the director and they spoke to him in the midst of insecurity like the ghost of a lost relative, like his grandfather’s dying mirage that would launch him into channeling the magic of the screen; understanding of the world was the ephemera, the mist he inhaled, soothing the body, and the whole world made sense until he needed to go to the theater again or pop on another movie on streaming. The idea of love splattered across his small flat in crushed powdered bones and blood and guts; that invisible and intangible substance, rough and powdery and gooey; informing his ideas on what is ecstatic in this world.
Billy was unable to read until he was 8 and he was bullied for it: he remembers mouths meant for taunting and leaving spit in his hair and how this created the aural vibrations of superiority upon which his mind would shake while he would wobble around words and his speech came out in stutters. A dissonant serenade of stops and starts would infuriate his peers and he was unsure what to do about it; he much prefered to think of his rhythms as syncopated. He discovered acting and decided it would be his passion. He would be given the roles of idiots and the kids would laugh at his lines but he would be told that it meant he played his roles right. He opened his mouth as wide as possible in his delivery to project his voice yet words still struggled to crawl out. He remembered the physicality of the movie stars, the sculpted faces, and muscled bodies but little Billy was and would grow up to simply be an okay looking individual, but he saw characters who were not Hollywood attractive and such faces would comfort him; he could see them in his dreams telling him he would make it. His parents eventually made him go to speech therapy as his father told him he could no longer stand to see his son stumble over words and he felt humiliated at the vivisection of words but it would not stop until sentences thrown and written into air were no longer crooked. Even then, he would still play the roles meant to be laughed at, even through college, he felt like everyone was digging into his past to insult him or as though he gave off some strong spiritual stench in him that he couldn’t scrub off even if he scrubbed so hard his skin came off, even through acting gigs he felt laughed at without once thinking that he was doing his comedic roles properly until he saw the audition of a lifetime. People would buy merch of him and hoist them atop of shelves and probably not even look at him but he didn’t think about what would happen after something is bought what mattered to him was that they bought it, anyways he couldn’t even think that such a thing would happen as he looked with pride upon his small collection of merchandise he had amassed with the measly money he yolked out of chores from his parents who did everything possible to do things around the house they didn’t want to do; when cracking shells the yolk was too large and the egg whites were barely there and there was little of sustenance from engaging with the world of his parents. He couldn’t buy any more merch from his pay otherwise he wouldn’t be able to buy instant meals but soon he would have great meals from a world renowned chef in his soon to be fancy kitchen.
It was time for his audition and a shot at his rightful big budget stardom; the movies were paid for with cash that could fill great expanses; he wanted his great expanses; that vastness in his being to be filled by cash; if it was filled with pennies it would fill the greatest expanses possible; tackiness brought the soul an unnameable goo. He walked through the door and stared at their faces; he would be part of a big franchise and those critics’ scores just showed how little they knew about what the people wanted; he wanted to sign props and posters and have people of all ages admiring him; his role would give him approximately 15 minutes of screentime in a 2 hour 30 minute movie but the movie was going to be the greatest crowd pleaser and surely he would steal the show, surely he could steal the show from the star John Cruseau. He looked at his lines and stared at them and gave them the performance of his lifetime. He waited for a callback as time stretched like the intestines uncoiled and pulled out from the human body; the clocks ticked like pipe bombs; the days turned like pages of inbred shamanistic scribble. He never got a call.
One day, Mr. Billy Barry Block was walking around and found a store for signed props. He went into the store and found a real axe fashioned like one of those science fiction weapons and saw that the person who signed it was not a name he could recognize and yet it was the only thing he could afford to buy in the store. He decided to fork out the remaining money in his bank account for it. The idea of such fantastical weapons becoming something corporeal (a word he would use for the rest of his life and had never used in his life), something so real and tangible, drew him in and he had to spend his remaining money on it. He found one of the people at the audition and drove his axe into his skull. The fact his bank account was empty no longer mattered.